The aspect of amateur astronomy culture that discouraged me was the awful code published in Sky & Telescope back in the late 80s or early 90s.
They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers.
As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete since about 1985. It also probably influenced me away from ever learning Forth by association.
Not to mention, that when I got a book on astronomical computer algorithms, it turned out that the available implementations were in Fortran, which to my taste was as bad or worse.